Introduction: The Mirror of Information in Early Modern England

Abstract

In his introduction, Fleming establishes the real or universal character movement of seventeenth-century England as the main target of his historical investigation. He also outlines the hypothesis of a phenomenological comparison between period technologies of the real character—an objective code allowing scientific discourse about items in an encyclopedic database—and modern information theory. With reference to Hubert Dreyfus’s failed 2001 attempt to show that internet search would never work (falsified, almost immediately, by the rise of Google), Fleming argues that real-time critiques of the infosphere are doomed to failure. He then proposes that a historical perspective may be more promising. Dreyfus’s earlier 1972 critique, articulating the “first step” fallacy of artificial intelligence research, is a guide. We may be able to learn something about the nature of information, as both theory and technology, by looking into the early-modern real-character movement: the mirror of information.